Stuck in the Middle With You: A Memoir of Parenting in Three Genders (22 page)

You know, maybe this is a big digression and not what you want to talk about, but did you know that my mom and I took part in a very famous study at Johns Hopkins?

JFB:
No.

TK:
It’s called the Strange Situation, and it was a landmark study in attachment theory.

JFB:
The Strange Situation.

TK:
There would be a mother and infant in a room by themselves. Then the mother would leave, then the mother would come back. Then a stranger would enter the room and then the mother would leave the child with the stranger and then come back again. Something like that. And, by observing the reaction of infants in this situation in a very formal, clinical way, they were able to group people into several different classifications as either securely attached, ambivalently attached, insecurely attached, et cetera. And longitudinal studies show that people stay in those same categories or tend to stay in those same categories by and large for long periods of time, if not for life.

JFB:
Do you know what group they classified you in?

TK:
It sounds like, based on my mom’s description of my behavior, I might have been ambivalently attached, but that’s not something I can gauge.

JFB:
At what point did you change your mind about your biological mother? Was it like a nagging feeling that came over you, the older you got?

TK:
I think that the older you get, the more aware you become that you are, to some extent, a prisoner of your genes and there’s certain things about you that are, if not impossible to change, really not very malleable.

Certain aspects of your personality are pretty set, and eventually, you start to wonder, Okay. What’s the deal with that? Where did I—where did this come from? And your parentage starts to seem like one possible answer to that.

Also, this was around the time I was forty, and it occurred to me that my birth mother, who was twenty-one when she had me, would now be sixty-one, which isn’t old, but it’s not young either. And you don’t know. Anything could happen.

You don’t necessarily have all the time in the world to make these decisions, and also, I’m just usually up for an adventure. And it seemed like something I’d rather do than not.

JFB:
Were you afraid of spoiling the mystery?

TK:
Yeah, sure. I like mystery. In fact, when they sent me a report from the adoption agency containing a lot of nonidentifying
information, which included way more detailed information than I expected, about the circumstances of my birth and adoption—well, really, a whole little like nativity story of me.

JFB:
Would you be willing to tell the story?

TK:
It’s not entirely my story to tell. I would say it was, you know, pretty typical of millions of stories that happened around that time. Let’s just say it was youthful recklessness that led to a pregnancy. And this was pre–
Roe v. Wade
.

So she was sent away with a cover story from her father—everyone agreed he would be killed by this—and, you know, went to some home for miserable teen mothers overseen by mean ladies where she waited to have me, give me up for adoption.

I definitely hesitated before reading this because no matter what the story was it would then be one thing instead of another. The mystery would be replaced with just the plain old facts and my life would be like everybody else’s life.

JFB:
What was your fantasy of who she might be or who your father might be? Wasn’t there some story about your horrible toe?

TK:
You know, I have yet to confirm this. I have this second toe which is longer than my first toe and crooked at the end. It kind of bends over towards the smaller toes. It’s called the Morton toe.

It’s an indelicate thing to ask girls to see their feet, but I have yet to ask my birth mother or half sisters whether they have this toe.

JFB:
So you knew you had the toe. There was nothing in the birth report—
P.S.: Has hideous toes, same as mother
.

TK:
Nobody in my adoptive family has the toe. I’ve got this Other—this Other toe—“other” capitalized like they do in grad school. This toe that is Other.

JFB:
Wasn’t there a long delay between getting the first report from the adoption agency and when you decided to actually make contact?

TK:
Uh-huh.

JFB:
I believe that you said to me, at one point, “Well, my biological mother gave me life and then gave me to a good family, and now, I will do her the favor of leaving her alone.”

What did you just put on that slider? What is that? Applesauce?

TK:
It’s some sort of applesauce but—

JFB:
It’s applesauce on your burger?

TK:
Well, it’s not a burger. It’s pork.

JFB:
Awesome.

TK:
That folder sat on my desk for four years, and I don’t know why I kept not getting around to it. It was just like any other daunting chore. Like, you know, doing your taxes or filling out insurance forms. Except, obviously, there was something more to it than that. And I don’t know why I did it either.

All it involved was filling out kind of a nosy little questionnaire for the state of Maryland and then writing a letter of introduction, which the agency would forward to my birth mother if they could locate her.

But writing a letter of introduction to your unknown birth mother is the sort of task that can take a writer a while.

JFB:
So what was that letter like? Did you go through lots of drafts?

TK:
Mainly, I wanted, initially, to reassure her that I was not a crazy person who intended to glom onto her in some clingy, desperate way. I wasn’t hitting her up for money, didn’t want to intrude on her life, because, after all, it’s possible that she had her own family who she may never have told about me, and I didn’t want to wreck all that for her.

I have another friend, who was adopted, who actually called her birth mother out of nowhere. Like, she did the tracking down herself rather than having an adoption agency. And she had scripted out her whole conversation in a very careful way, you know, in case her mother was not free to talk or didn’t want to acknowledge her.

She had planned to say something like, “I was adopted. You know I was born on such and such a date in such and such a city and was adopted through this agency. I’ve been conducting a search for my biological mother, and that search has led me to you.” Not in any way saying, “You are my mother.”

So she got through about half a sentence of that, and the woman on the other end of the phone said, “I know who this is.” Like she had been waiting for it every second of her life.

JFB:
So you wrote this letter to your mother saying, “I’m not a crazy person.” Tell me more about the letter.

TK:
I told her a little bit about my life now. I told her that my parents had been great parents and my upbringing had been fine. And another reason I’ll say that I think I wrote this at the time I did is that life had unexpectedly turned out okay against what might have seemed like the odds.

I had a contract to write a book, and I got to be a writer. And I was living in New York and doing okay, and it seemed like possibly a narrow window in which this would be true.

JFB:
So then let’s cut, all Quentin Tarantino–style, to your biological mom’s house. Your mom finds a letter from you. What was that like for her?

TK:
She answered that letter within two weeks, and she told me later she would have answered sooner but she was on vacation in Italy. The night she got back—they’d just gotten off this long transatlantic flight back to the house.

There was a heap of mail on the dining room table that their house-sitter had put there. She wasn’t going to deal with any of this. She wanted to have a glass of wine and put her feet up and then go to bed. And, as she tells it, at random, she picked one envelope up off the table, and she saw the return address, and she instantly knew what it was.

She told her husband what it was, and he said, “Well, what are you going to do?” And she said, “What do you think I’m going to do?” You know, as if there was any question in her mind, and so she wrote back.

And her letter, I would say, reciprocated the tone of mine. We were both very cautious and deferential. Wanted to make clear no one here is crazy.

But, clearly, there were great and complicated emotions restrained behind both our letters, and so we exchanged a couple of more letters and then last names and other contact information so that we could write each other directly. Eventually, we talked on the phone and—

JFB:
So what was the phone conversation like?

TK:
Our first phone conversation lasted about an hour and a half, and it was a little bit like—it’s been a long time, I suppose, since you’ve been on a date. But when you go on a first date, even if the first date goes really well and you have a lot to talk about and you make each
other laugh, when you go home, you’re completely exhausted because you’ve been on and evaluating a great deal of information and under a lot of stress. It was a little like that.

JFB:
Did she sound like you?

TK:
In a way, she seems younger than me now. She seems like me ten years ago. I was much more strident then politically, much more intolerant to the other side. I was just more absolutist in my views, and she seems like that.

Like she seems like she’s in her twenties when she talks about politics, for example.

JFB:
I think you told me something about how she wanted to apologize for the wildness of her younger self to you.

TK:
Well, I wouldn’t put it like that. At no time did she apologize for anything, but she did tell me—this was the first time we met in person. She told me pretty much her whole life story, and I felt that she wanted me to understand why this had happened.

She seemed very reproachful of her younger self in a way that you would if you hadn’t attained much distance from it yet. Most of us get to grow up gradually, and so, you know, for a while, we’re unforgiving of our youthful screwups and then, eventually, we’re like, “Eh, I was young.”

JFB:
We embrace them.

TK:
Yes. Though of course, I never had any accidental children. But she felt like she had just made irrevocable, terrible mistakes.

JFB:
Had the child that she’d given up haunted her? Was she somebody who had been waiting to hear from you all of her life?

TK:
She told me that she couldn’t really bear to see pictures of soldiers killed in Iraq or Afghanistan because, for all she knew, I might be one of them.

You know, she just didn’t know if I was okay. I took with me all these visual aids the first time I met her, like childhood photos and drawings, because I was panicking a little bit. I felt I needed, you know, diagrams, charts.

Mostly she didn’t want to look at that stuff. I suspect it might have been too painful for her, but the one thing that she looked at, that
seemed to bring her a great deal of relief, was a photo of my young adoptive mother with me on her lap.

And she just looked so pretty and happy, and she looked like she loved me, and I looked well cared for. I think it was just a load off her mind to see that, “Okay. Decent people, who loved this child, got him. He was okay. I made the right decision after all. It all worked out.”

JFB:
How did she break the news to your half sisters?

TK:
She had often wanted to tell them about me, but she felt like there was no ending to that story yet. And she, I think, felt like she would be at a loss for words if they asked, “Well, what happened to this kid? Where is he?” You know, she had no idea.

That would be a scary thing to tell a kid if they were really young. “Oh, you had a brother, but I gave him away.”

But those girls are nobody’s fools. They intuited that something was up with her before she told them. In fact, one of them caught her compiling what looked like a family medical history as if for one of them, and their mother acted all sheepish as if she’d been caught at something when she saw her. And that was Emma, my younger sister, and after that episode, she called her older sister on the phone. She said, “So listen. I think we maybe have a secret half sibling.”

JFB:
You’re right. She is nobody’s fool.

TK:
No, she’s not. Very Nancy Drew–like.

JFB:
So how did she break the news?

TK:
My birth mother sat them down and said, “Okay. Look, girls, I know you know that there’s something up. Here’s—I have something to tell you.” And she told them.

JFB:
And their reaction was?

TK:
I do not know what their reaction was at that time. I think, in a letter, she described them as being, you know, in a little bit of shock but basically taking it well.

JFB:
Shock that there had been such a secret or shocked that their mother had a—

TK:
I think shocked that there had been such a secret. Yeah. I mean it would completely revise your little story in your head about what your family was. There’s not just the four of you. You’re not the
oldest child anymore, for example. All that stuff suddenly gets revised. It’s weird.

Although, when I met them, about a week after I met her, they were unbelievably kind and warmhearted and open and accepting with me. They were really just nothing but nice about the whole thing, although they could easily have been standoffish or jealous or hostile.

JFB:
It seems, in some ways, as if finding out that you had half siblings was at least as powerful as meeting your biological mother. Is that right?

TK:
It was very moving.